What Do Advertisers Really Want? Profit…

Jon Waite

Global Managing Director of Mx, Havas Media Network -

I felt the recent piece of work from Ebiquity (one of the world’s largest media auditors) and Lumen Research (one of the world’s largest collectors of attention data) went somewhat under the radar when it was released a few weeks ago.

BUT it’s possibly one of the only most robust and important pieces of evidence around the efficacy of Attention metrics so far.

Over the past seven years, we have seen an overwhelming number of research studies from academia and industry alike that have shown (somewhat obviously you might think) that attention to advertising (defined by eyes on ads) leads to greater lifts in brand success measures like Recall, Awareness, Preference and Action intent. Most recently from our own study at Havas with Lumen and Brand Metrics ‘What do 9,000 brand lift studies tell us about Attention & Memory’.

This relationship has been shown time and time again from completely different (and competitive) institutions like Lumen and Amplified Intelligence using drastically contrasting methods and datasets. And most of these are coming from distinct (and highly competitive) media agency groups such as Dentsu, OMD, and Havas. So, the continued consilience that we see is no coincidence at this point; these are becoming ‘laws.’

But what has been lacking from this research is a more long-term view of how attention to ads affects the thing that all marketers really want… profit.

So, when Thinkbox and Ebiquity, in partnership with GroupM, released their immense analysis of short and long-term ROI across media channels ‘profitability 2.0 – the new case for advertising effectiveness’ I got very, very excited.

On the surface, it looked to me like the channels delivering more profit (defined using MMM techniques) were also those that we look to consistently deliver more Attention —a fact that did not escape the notice of Mike Follett and David Bassett of Lumen.

Never the ones to sit still, Lumen set about working with Ebiquity to analyse the £1.8bn media spend for which they have ROI data and apply the Lumen Attention model to those same campaigns. What would they find?

In Mike’s words ‘we didn’t believe the analysis at first, we had to go back and double and triple check the numbers’ because what they established was a ‘near perfect correlation between Attention and profit’.

Why is this important?

Attention isn’t some luxury ‘vanity’ metric, it’s at the heart of how we deliver effective advertising campaigns in media and inextricably tied to profit driven from advertising.
Attention in and of itself isn’t an outcome, but it is perhaps one of the most important leading indicators of potential success (viewed in conjunction with Reach, Frequency, and Cost…)
ROI derived from MMM is a fantastic guide for helping brands to allocate budgets across channels at a top line, i.e. TV vs. Press vs. Social. But MMMs are slow-moving and struggle to pull apart results across different media at a more granular level, e.g. Linear TV vs. VOD, Netflix vs. Disney+, or MPUs vs. Banners…
With Attention identified as a solid leading indicator for incremental profit, this allows media planning and activation teams to use Attention data at a really granular level for deeper budget allocation decisions and optimisations in a way that ROI data can rarely be used.

Of course, this relationship between incremental profit and Attention will be dependent upon a number of variables both controllable and uncontrollable, and will be subject to diminishing returns based on investment levels, but it’s hard not to look at this as a much more actionable measure of potential success than some legacy media targets and goals.

So, I’m sorry to do it… but here’s a funnel…

Based on all we know, what is the role for Attention metrics in media planning and optimisation?

First and foremost, it’s a measure of the quality of the ‘Reach’ that we are buying. Reach is a calculation of delivered media currencies (Impacts, Impressions, GRPs, etc.) which vary hugely in their definition of an exposure to a real human. Attention tells you if the ad placement was of sufficient quality as to be seen by a Human… and the better the quality often the longer the gaze. Call it ‘Attention Reach, ‘Qualitative Reach’, whatever you want… In effect, more real people are more likely to actually see what we’re putting out there.

As media planning and buying practitioners, our job is to convert more of that reach potential into actual attention through our media investment decisions. Metrics like VTR, CTR, Viewability, Ad Size, Ad Clutter, etc. all tell us something about the potential for an ad to be seen, but they are NOT the outcome of success.

As we’ve established time and time again, better and optimal levels of attention can drive increases in brand measures like Awareness, Consideration, and Preference, here called ‘Impact.’

So, by investing in higher quality placements that deliver better attention, we are in turn creating more impact.

The level by which Attention converts to impact and the relationship, however, is not linear… It’s then the role of creative and relevance to ensure that the Attention potential of the media placement is converted to memory. Media planners have a role to play here with targeting, in-market customers are more likely to pay attention to ads for products they are actively in the market for etc.

And of course, creative needs to ensure assets are fit for the media formats in which they are placed, paying careful consideration to the real-world knowledge we have about how people actually view different ad placements. If an ad placement only ever gets 2 seconds of Attention… design it appropriately!

So, there are three things to remember:

Attention means more Reach
Attention increases brand success measures
Attention = Profit

The value of better media experiences has never been clearer, ads that offer people a better experience as consumers —and are on platforms designed to entertain and add value to user’s experience— consistently perform for brands.